![]() ![]() The puzzle of Wyatt's metre was famously summed up by an early twentieth-century reviewer of a modern edition of his poems, who observed "at one moment he is the equal of the greatest in his command of rhythm and metre at another he seems to be laboriously counting syllables on his fingers - and getting them wrong sometimes This paper explores the origins of Wyatt's proto-pentameter in a misconstruction of the Italian endecasillabo, and tries to show that the mixture of familiarity and strangeness we find in his versification can be explained by the fact that he was writing as a pioneer at the very beginning of the modern English pentameter tradition. Hanson's (2001, 2006) reconsideration of the role of syllable quantity in Elizabethan metrical theory and Elizabethan poetry should be continued. ![]() He contrasted stress and weight in the quantitative Sapphic lyric 'Come let us sound with melodie' (Campion, 1601). His two iambic pentameters – the 'pure' and the 'licentiate' – are both accentual and quantitative meters that, in accordance with moraic theory, integrate stress and strength with syllable weight. The analysis demonstrates that (1) Campion distinguished between syllable weight (syllable quantity) and stress or strength (accent) in Early Modern English (2) Campion prohibited syllabic consonants in English iambic pentameter, despite the fact that they were attested in Early Modern English as a whole (3) in a successful adaptation of the Latin rule of 'position', as described by William Lily and John Colet's Short Introduction of Grammar (1567), Campion re-syllabified coda consonants followed by vowels and (4) Campion employed syllabic elision as a means of avoiding pyrrhic syllable combinations that resulted in non-maximal filling of long positions in a line of English iambic pentameter. Following Kristin Hanson (2001, 2006), this article parses Campion's scansions of Early Modern English syllables, according to moraic theory, into resolved moraic trochees. Syntactically based scansion is also more accurate, and able to identify a wider range of rhythms (including free verse and triple rhythms) in contexts where traditional scansion fails.įulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred to as the 'quantitative movement', Thomas Campion succeeded in demonstrating the role of syllable quantity, or phonological weight, in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. Syntactically derived stress assignments are much closer to native-speaker assessments of stress and so produce more natural scansions. From this research, it is clear that referencing syntax improves the accuracy of scansion. This identifies the skill level of each application. A third experiment enters the applications in an online poetry contest against humans, allowing them to be measured against a critic’s actual criteria. ![]() This is used to estimate how far each application approximates human assumptions when it does not match expert scansion. The second experiment uses a survey of non-experts to determine the acceptability of the applications’ scansions and of expert scansion. ![]() The first experiment assessed the applications against expert scansions of a large corpus to determine which one identifies rhythm the best. In each of three experiments, three applications are tested: one does not use syntax (Scandroid), one uses it for stress assignments only (Revised Scandroid), and one, which I have developed, uses it to determine both stress and scansion (Phonological Scansion). The research seeks to evaluate the impact of syntax on scansion generally and computer scansion in particular. However, no current computer scansion program references it, and most recent research has overlooked it (Hayes, 2005). One improvement is proposed by recent linguistic research: according to Hayes and Kaun (1996), syntax is an essential component in both stress and scansion assignment. The best, including Scandroid (Hartman, 2005), only scan as well as the undergraduates they are designed to help, because they depend on unreliable procedures to identify the stress in syllables and the rhythm in lines. In the last decade a large number of computer programs have been developed to identify scansion in English poetry – that is, the intended rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. ![]()
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